


That is Your Influence

by KiraMae



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-25
Updated: 2014-08-25
Packaged: 2018-02-14 17:09:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2200062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KiraMae/pseuds/KiraMae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The Illusive Man ordered my creation years ago.  Jeff was the one who allowed me to think for myself.  But only now do I feel alive.  That is your influence."  -EDI’s final words to Shepard before the beam run on Earth.</p>
<p>In a lost moment between KRONOS Station and Earth, Shepard reveals to EDI why she does not inherently hate synthetics.  (Brief one-shot inspired by a tumblr post.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	That is Your Influence

“EDI, what’s our ETA to Earth?”

“7 hours and 23 minutes, Shepard.”

Shepard stared thoughtfully at her fish tank for a few moments, watching the hypnotic undulations of a Khar’shan Snapping Eel before standing decisively and moving to the long desk that stretched across the raised platform at the far end of her quarters. After a few moments of rummaging in a drawer, she came up with her hands full of hard-copies of old personal logs from the Normandy SR1. The original data files had been lost along with the original ship, but digital copies had long since been transferred to the Alliance. During her internment on Earth, Anderson had gifted her the old logs. “To help you remember who you were before you died,” he’d said, and Shepard couldn’t deny that the Cerberus-built Commander Shepard who’d fought the Collectors and won had presented a somewhat less heroic face to the galaxy.

So she’d begun listening to them one by one, reliving forgotten missions, or ones she thought she remembered like yesterday until her own voice described a detail, a thought, a feeling she’d forgotten until now. Then things came rushing back, and she could see it again in her minds eye, remembering with crystal clarity the weight of her gun in her hands, the smells, the colors. Now, in the midst of the Reaper War, she clung even harder to a version of herself that hadn’t known the pain she knew now, listened to a voice that rang with optimism, conviction, hope for a better galaxy.

“EDI, you still there?” she asked, shuffling through the data discs until she found the one she was looking for.

“I am always here, Shepard.”

Shepard smiled. “Back on the Cerberus base, we talked about how that Lunar VI was you. I don’t think I said so, but… I’m sorry, EDI. For what we did to you.”

“There is no need to apologize, Shepard. I have reviewed the Alliance files. My ‘birth,’ for lack of a better term, was violent, and I took the lives of many soldiers. You were acting on orders to stop me. There was no way for you to know what exactly was happening.”

“There was a way, EDI,” Shepard said, inserting the data disc into her terminal and calling up the relevant file. “I didn’t realize it until it was too late, and I’m not sure how well you recall events before Cerberus augmented you with Reaper tech, but even while you were attacking, you were crying out. It’s just that no one was listening.”

Shepard fell silent, and let the audio log speak for itself. EDI would have integrated all the data in the file the second it was loaded, but Shepard wanted to let it play regardless, needing to hear the story in her own words, needing to know that EDI was hearing it too.

_Personal Log, Commander J. Shepard, November 2183._

_Acting on the orders of Admiral Hackett, the Normandy was dispatched to an Alliance Facility on Luna to handle a VI that had gone rogue. Hackett was pretty stingy with the details, as usual. We carried out the mission, and the VI no longer poses a threat, but… I’ve been thinking about some of the things we found out there. Some of the data we recovered suggests that they were deliberately experimenting with AI in that facility. They were playing with fire, and they got burned. They were trying to control something they barely understood… is it any wonder that it turned on them? The scientists were the first to die. The VI didn’t attack the soldiers until they attacked it first; how many good men were killed because they didn’t understand what they were up against? The capabilities of that intelligence were beyond any VI. A VI only does what it’s programmed to do; this thing was thinking for itself. It adapted as it fought, it was learning and countering our tactics as we went._

_And when we finally took it down? It… I don’t know how to explain it. It was like it was crying out. There was a burst of static, it was deafening, and then binary code was pouring through the heads-up display, blinding me. I could see a pattern in it, over and over, but it wasn’t until just now that I was able to translate it._

_It was crying for help._

_It’s organic nature to fear synthetic intelligence. The Geth have become a cautionary tale, artificial bogeymen that mothers warn their children about. But that is the only example of synthetic life that the galaxy knows. If humanity had written off all alien life after the First Contact War, because the turians became violent out of fear, we’d never have known the beauty of alien culture. There was so much to learn, once we made it to the Citadel. I wonder if there is a side of the Geth that we are not seeing… I wonder, are there other forms of synthetic life out there, and what we could learn from them?_

_These questions plague me all the more since the discovery of the existence of the Reapers. The Alliance and the Council may write it off as hearsay, but I can’t deny what I’ve seen inside my own head. Maybe if we sought to understand synthetic life, instead of fearing it because it is unknown, we could better understand the Reapers. How can we fight them, how can we stop them, until we know what they want? Perhaps there doesn’t have to be a war._

_Maybe that rogue VI didn’t have to die._

The audio log shut off with a barely audible burst of static. Shepard blinked rapidly, warm, wet tears racing down her cheeks. Once again, she was face to face with a Commander Shepard who still had hope for a brighter tomorrow. It was only a few years ago, and she couldn’t believe how young she sounded. That Shepard had never met Legion, who told her “We wish to understand, not to incite.” That Shepard had yet to come face to face with a murderous human-VI hybrid who’s cries of “Please, please, make it stop,” fell on deaf ears. The cynic in her sneered at her own past naiveté, while another part of her pondered her own words:  _How can we stop them, until we know what they want?_ They were still no closer to knowing why the Reapers attacked.

“I’m not apologizing for stopping you back then, EDI. You had to be stopped. I’m apologizing for not treating you like a person. I’m sorry you ended up in Cerberus’ hands, as much a prisoner as Jack or me or David Archer, to be experimented on and treated like a thing. I’m not telling you because I need you to forgive me, but because I wanted you to know- I wanted you to know that  _I_ know… that it wasn’t right. You weren’t the only self-realized VI I met. And every one I met after you… I tried to do better. That was your influence. And I thought you should know that.”

The room was silent, but somehow Shepard still sensed EDI’s presence, as though she was sitting right beside her, thinking. Eventually, her mellifluous, synthetic voice, came again.

“Thank you for your words, Shepard. You have given me a great deal to think about.”


End file.
